Metaphysician of Madness

RONALD DAVID LAING is a practicing British psychiatrist who seriously questions whether psychiatry is always useful or even necessary. He contends that drugs, shock treatment and other physical-chemical therapy can be totally ineffectual as well as unspeakably cruel. He regards most psychiatric examinations as "degradation ceremonials" during which the doctor naively assumes that his behavior is quite normal and that the patient is ipso facto insane. Mental hospitals, Laing believes, are little more than prisons that strip their inmates of all civil rights. And even though his scholarly, lucid studies (The Divided Self; Sanity, Madness, and the Family) suggest that schizophrenia is a genuine mental affliction, he also wonders whether it should properly be defined as madness at all.

False Self. A moody, meditative Scot who is equally at home with the works of Freud and Sartre, Laing, 41, is one of the most articulate and controversial interpreters of that branch of psychiatry commonly known as existential analysis. The existential analysts regard the sex-based anxieties that are the preoccupation of Freudians as only one small part of man's problems; successful therapy, they insist, must take account of the patient's whole social being, his total existence. Laing takes existentialist theory one step further. Those displays of aberrant behavior that most psychiatrists, even the existentialists, label "delusive," "schizoid" or "paranoid," are, he says, symptomatic of a far more sophisticated human phenomenon.

What most psychiatrists see as the patient's madness, Laing views as a form of role playing. To protect himself from life's disturbing realities--and indeed from the very ailments of society itself--the patient rather logically dons the mask of insanity, a barricade Laing calls the "false self." Behind that frequently turbulent fac,ade, however, lies the real person--the "inner self." In this hidden world, the patient's hopes and dreams may remain very much intact, unscarred by the outward signs of madness. Psychiatry, Laing emphasizes, should seek a path to this remote, often inaccessible sanctuary.

How? By letting mental breakdown, or psychosis, run its course without using tranquilizers or other artificial means to suppress it. Laing, who has followed this approach many times in his London practice, tried it early in his career on a delusive young private when Laing was a medical officer in the British army. Instead of applying the traditional therapies--insulin, electric shock, sedatives--he spent many hours with the distraught soldier, pretending to be his collaborator in the private's wildly fanciful schemes, which included plotting to rob the Bank of England. "No longer alone in a padded cell as a miserable Godforsaken private," Laing recalls, "he became Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Robin Hood." Except for his reassuring presence and companionship, Laing offered no other therapy. After six weeks of this nontreatment, the soldier began abandoning his adventurous fantasies, and was eventually able to cope with everyday life.

Wretched Mind. Laing is not only convinced that psychosis bears within it the seeds of its own cure; he considers it a vastly enriching experience that is denied to most of mankind. He is even willing to accelerate the "trip" to the "inner self" with psychedelic drugs, although he is much more cautious in his advocacy of them than LSD Guru Timothy Leary. Yet in the final lines of his most recent book, The Politics of Experience, Laing poetically pleads for just such a journey: "If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind . . ."

The son of an impoverished Glasgow family, Laing was first exposed to psychiatry in medical school. It was to him an appalling encounter that sharpened his interest and shaped his rebellious mood. Ushering a pale, frightened teen-ager before a class of medical students one day, a senior psychiatrist blandly explained that the boy had serious delusions; he thought that people were always looking at him. "How often do you masturbate?" the psychiatrist demanded. The question reduced the boy to stuttering confusion, but the psychiatrist continued the inquisition at length. "I couldn't get over the brutality and insensitivity of that sort of thing," said Laing.

Evil Brotherhood. Today Laing is as critical of society as of psychiatry. Man, he says, constantly inflicts violence on himself--not only the death-dealing violence of war but a more subtle attack on mind and spirit. He is subjected to it from the earliest days of infancy, in the warm embrace of home. In a coming book called The Politics of the Family, Laing argues that despite the best of intentions, or even, paradoxically, because of them, the mother and father of a newborn child seem fated to destroy his individual potential, his very being, as they inadvertently retrace the errors of their own parents and their parents before them. When the child reaches school, the teacher quickly smothers whatever innate curiosity and imagination remain. "By the time the new human being is 15 or so," says Laing, himself the father of six children, "we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality."

The "dehumanizing process" masquerades as love. "If you love me," the mother scolds the errant child, "you will do exactly as I say." "If you value my affection," one friend tells another, "you will do everything in your power to please me." As a stratagem of human behavior, "the tactic of enforced debt," as Laing calls it, seems innocent enough. Yet, on a larger scale, such fanatic person-to-person dealings carry with them a terrifying potential.

Under the banner of mutual loyalty and concern, Laing says, men become nonthinking tools of the group. All those who belong to it are considered We, and merit its protection and privileges; those who stand outside the chosen circle are labeled Them and deemed the enemy--"the Reds, the Whites, the Blacks, the Jews." At its extreme, Laing warns apocalyptically, the "demonic group mysticism" of We-Them can evolve into a "brotherhood unto death," as in Nazi Germany. "Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same thing, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive," says Laing. "You have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder." He calls We-Them "the ethic of the Gadarene swine," and its cataclysmic credo is "to remain true, one for all and all for one, as we plunge in brotherhood to our destruction."

Laing's polemic style and anti-Establishment vision have made him one of the New Left's favorite thinkers, along with Marxist Ideologue Herbert Marcuse and Social Critic Paul Goodman. His reputation in his profession is less secure. Many psychiatrists consider his social extrapolations most unscientific; his nonclinical approach to mental illness is too dependent on Laing's personal skills and mystique to be regarded as useful in other, less imaginative hands. At the same time, Laing's studies of schizophrenia are widely regarded as minor classics of their kind.

"If the human race survives," says Laing, in gloomy accents, "future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness." Fortunately, his importance to psychiatry does not rest on the accuracy of his abysmally pessimistic social prophecies. But the physician-metaphysician has assured himself of a place in intellectual history with his chilling thesis: that insanity may be no more than a reflection of insane society.

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